If you are planning to buy a home, how should you finance it? The question is simple, but the answer may not be what first comes to mind.
"People like to go right to the 30-year, but that's the wrong thing to do," says Richard Rosso, a partner at Clarity Financial in Houston, referring to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, which was the traditional way people could borrow to buy a home up until the early 1980s.
It's hard for some to believe, but the adjustable-rate mortgage as a widely available way to borrow is only a few decades old. Maybe for that reason, the idea that the fixed-rate mortgage as the go-to product seems to have stuck in the American psyche like chewing gum on the sole of a shoe. Read more here.